Kennedy Brewer Case: DNA Exoneration, Forensic Failures, and Reforms

The Kennedy Brewer case is the story of a Mississippi man who spent 15 years in prison, seven of them on death row, for the 1992 rape and murder of a three-year-old girl he did not kill. Brewer was convicted in 1995 on bite-mark testimony that was later discredited, and he became the first person in Mississippi exonerated through post-conviction DNA testing when charges against him were dropped on February 15, 2008.¹ The DNA identified the actual killer, a man investigators had considered a suspect from the start.²

The Crime and the Arrest

In May 1992, three-year-old Christine Jackson was taken from her home in the Pilgrim’s Rest community near Brooksville, Mississippi, sexually assaulted, and killed by manual strangulation. Her body was found in a creek behind the house. Brewer, who was dating Christine’s mother, Gloria Jackson, was arrested on May 3, 1992, and indicted that September for capital murder committed during a sexual battery.³

Investigators had another name in front of them almost immediately: Justin Albert Johnson, a local man whose blood was collected and preserved at the Mississippi State Crime Laboratory. It sat there for more than a decade. Authorities focused on Brewer.²

How the Conviction Was Built

Brewer’s trial began in March 1995 in Noxubee County Circuit Court, nearly three years after his arrest. The prosecution rested on two forensic experts.³

Dr. Steven Hayne, who performed the autopsy, testified that Christine had been strangled and showed injuries consistent with rape, and that marks on her body looked like bite marks. He called in forensic odontologist Dr. Michael West to analyze them. West told the jury that 19 marks on the child were “indeed and without a doubt” inflicted by Brewer, and that the wounds were made by Brewer’s top two teeth alone, with no impression from the bottom teeth.¹

The defense called Dr. Richard Souviron, a founding member of the American Board of Forensic Odontology, who testified that the marks were not human bites at all. He said they were insect bites sustained while the body was in the water, and that West’s account of the injuries was “all but impossible.”¹ The jury sided with the prosecution. Brewer was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death by lethal injection.³

DNA Testing and Years of Delay

The Mississippi Supreme Court affirmed Brewer’s conviction and sentence in July 1998.³ In 2001, the Innocence Project secured DNA testing on semen recovered from the victim. The results excluded Brewer and matched Justin Albert Johnson, the suspect whose blood had been sitting in the state crime lab.²

The DNA did not end the case. In June 2002, the Mississippi Supreme Court called the DNA “quite compelling” but declined to vacate the conviction, holding that the jury had also relied on the bite-mark testimony. It sent the case back for an evidentiary hearing rather than ordering a new trial.⁴ District Attorney Forrest Allgood argued that West’s bite-mark match still proved Brewer’s participation, and, according to reporting by the Mississippi Free Press, tried to block a search of the state DNA database that could have identified the true killer sooner.⁵ Brewer stayed on death row for years after the exculpatory results came back. A Lowndes County judge eventually granted a retrial, and he was released on bond in 2007.²

The Mississippi Attorney General’s office removed the case from local prosecutors on conflict grounds and appointed Ben Creekmore, a district attorney from Oxford, as special prosecutor. On February 15, 2008, all charges were dropped. Brewer became the 127th person exonerated from death row in the United States since 1973 and the 16th freed through DNA testing.⁶²

The Levon Brooks Connection and the Real Killer

Brewer’s case never stood alone. Two years before Christine Jackson’s murder, in 1990, three-year-old Courtney Smith was abducted, sexually assaulted, and killed in the same Brooksville community. Her body was found in a pond. Levon Brooks was convicted of that killing in 1992 and sentenced to life in prison.⁷

The two cases mirrored each other. Both victims were three-year-old girls taken from their homes at night, both were found in nearby water, the same sheriff’s officer investigated, the same district attorney prosecuted, and the same two experts, Hayne and West, provided the forensic testimony. Justin Albert Johnson had been a suspect in both.¹⁷

When the DNA in Brewer’s case matched Johnson, Johnson confessed to both murders.⁸¹⁹

Johnson pleaded guilty on February 9, 2012, to two counts of capital murder for the deaths of Christine Jackson and Courtney Smith. He was sentenced to life without parole. Allgood said he would have preferred to seek the death penalty but declined to do so at the request of the victims’ families.¹⁰

The Discredited Forensic Evidence

The convictions of Brewer and Brooks turned on Dr. Michael West, an odontologist whose methods were already under scrutiny by 1995. West had been the first member ever suspended from the American Board of Forensic Odontology, and Mississippi courts allowed him to testify anyway.¹ Later expert panels concluded that the marks West identified were likely caused by crawfish, insects, or other aquatic activity on submerged bodies.¹¹ Other reviewers found “no scientific basis” for calling the marks bites at all, and called West’s claim of 19 injuries made only with upper teeth “unreasonable and unprecedented.”¹² West stopped performing bite-mark analysis in 2006.¹³

Dr. Steven Hayne, meanwhile, served as the de facto state medical examiner in Mississippi for nearly two decades, performing about 80 percent of the state’s autopsies and doing between 1,200 and 1,800 a year, far above the National Association of Medical Examiners’ recommended maximum of 250. He never passed the American Board of Pathology’s forensic pathology certification.¹³ He was removed from Mississippi’s list of approved medical examiners in August 2008. The Mississippi State Board of Medical Licensure took no disciplinary action on an Innocence Project complaint.¹⁴ Both Hayne and West have denied wrongdoing and defended their work.¹⁵

The broader discipline has not fared better. A 2009 report by the National Academy of Sciences found “substantial rates of erroneous results” in bite-mark analysis. In 2016, the Texas Forensic Science Commission concluded that bite-mark testimony “does not meet the standards of forensic science” and recommended ending its use in criminal trials. At least 26 people have been identified as wrongfully convicted based on bite-mark evidence.¹⁶

The Prosecutor

District Attorney Forrest Allgood prosecuted both Brewer and Brooks and continued defending West’s work long after other odontologists had rejected it. The Washington Post reported that Allgood at one point compared West to Copernicus, “a man of science widely misunderstood by his contemporaries.”¹⁷ Allgood also prosecuted Tyler Edmonds and Sabrina Butler, both of whose convictions the Mississippi Supreme Court overturned, according to the Mississippi Free Press.⁵ He said he “would not have prosecuted them unless he believed Brooks and Brewer to be guilty.”¹⁸ Allgood lost his reelection bid in November 2015 to challenger Scott Colom. No formal disciplinary action or bar complaints against him have been publicly reported.

The Civil Suit That Failed

Brewer and Brooks sued Hayne and West in federal court under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, arguing that false or misleading forensic evidence had violated their due process rights. On June 27, 2017, the Fifth Circuit affirmed dismissal on qualified immunity grounds, finding that while the record was suggestive of negligence or gross negligence, it did not meet the threshold of intentional fabrication needed to overcome immunity. State law claims remained pending in the district court at the time of that ruling.¹⁹

Compensation and Reforms in Mississippi

The exonerations prompted legislative changes. On March 16, 2009, Governor Haley Barbour signed a law allowing prisoners to petition for post-conviction DNA testing, making Mississippi the 46th state with such a law. The statute also required law enforcement to preserve biological evidence for as long as a case remained unsolved or a defendant remained under state supervision.²⁰

Later that month, Barbour signed a compensation statute providing $50,000 for each year of wrongful imprisonment, capped at $500,000 and paid in annual installments. It was made retroactive to cover Brewer and Brooks. Accepting the money required waiving the right to sue the state.²¹

Life After Death Row

Brewer returned to Brooksville, where he lives with his extended family. He has a fiancée, Omelia, and two children who were infants when he was sentenced to death. In 2020 he collaborated with the Innocence Project and photographer Isabelle Armand on a project documenting his daily life after prison.²²²³²⁴

1
Innocence Project. Kennedy Brewer
2
Death Penalty Information Center. Kennedy Brewer Exonerated From Death Row in Mississippi Through DNA Testing
3
Justia. Brewer v. State, No. 95-DP-00915-SCT
4
FindLaw. Brewer v. State, No. 1999-DR-00589-SCT
5
Mississippi Free Press. Bad Prosecutors in Mississippi and Beyond
6
Innocence Project. Two Innocent Men Cleared Today in Separate Murder Cases in Mississippi
7
Innocence Project. Levon Brooks
8
Picayune Item. Hearing on Motion to Exonerate Man in Child Murder Set for Friday
9
Mississippi Today. Levon and Kennedy: Visual Proof of Life After Wrongful Convictions
10
Commercial Dispatch. Noxubee Man Gets Life Sentence for Rape, Murder
11
NPR. Flawed Autopsies Send Two Innocent Men to Jail
12
FindLaw. Brewer v. Hayne, Nos. 16-60116 and 16-60342
13
American Bar Association. Dark Tale of The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist
14
Mississippi Free Press. Former Pathologist Sues Innocence Project
15
Wall Street Journal. The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist Review
16
Innocence Project. Why Bite Mark Evidence Should Never Be Used in Criminal Trials
17
Washington Post. One of America’s Worst Prosecutors Lost Last Night
18
Commercial Dispatch. The Innocence Files Takes Aim at Allgood’s Use of Bite Mark Evidence
19
U.S. Court of Appeals, Fifth Circuit. Brewer v. Hayne, Nos. 16-60116 and 16-60342
20
Innocence Project. Mississippi Exonerations Spark Reforms
21
Clarion Ledger. State to Pay Thousands to Wrongfully Convicted
22
Innocence Project. Life After Exoneration With Kennedy Brewer in Mississippi
23
Center for the Study of Southern Culture. Mississippi Innocence
24
Christian Science Monitor. The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist Review